Money Beyond Borders with Barry Eichengreen

Apr 13, 2026

Barry Eichengreen, economic historian and Berkeley professor, maps 2,500 years of cross-border money. He traces coins from ancient Lydia and Rome to the Florentine florin, Spanish silver, and the rise of the pound and dollar. He discusses why the euro and renminbi struggle to displace the dollar and how CBDCs and tokenized deposits could reshape global payments.

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INSIGHT

How Coinage Created Early Global Money

Coins began in Lydia as standardized stamped disks, which enabled convenient cross-border use across the Greek world.
The Lydian innovation of stamped metal spread to Athens and Rome, creating long-lived international currencies like the Athenian owl and Roman denarius.

INSIGHT

Political Institutions Sustain Currency Value

Roman monetary stability depended on Republican checks and balances over mints, which weakened under imperial rule.
Emperors like Nero debased the denarius to fund spending, triggering successive debasements and the denarius's global decline.

ANECDOTE

Florence Became A Global Currency Without An Empire

Florence became a global monetary actor despite being a small city-state by inventing multinational banking and ledger transfers.
Florentine bankers served the Pope and English king and preferred settling in florins, spreading the florin across Europe and beyond.

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Doubts about the international dominance of the dollar are only growing amid worries about tariffs, political dysfunction, and fraying international alliances. Will the dollar continue to reign supreme? In Money Beyond Borders, the leading authority on international currencies, Barry Eichengreen, puts the dollar's prospects in deep historical perspective by chronicling the entire history of cross-border currencies, from the invention of coins in the seventh century BCE to the cryptocurrencies of today and the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow.

Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto (Princeton University Press, 2026) recounts how Greek and Roman coins became the first true international currencies. It tells how the Florentine gold florin became the "greenback of the Renaissance," and how it was succeeded by Spanish silver and a Dutch fiat currency. The book explains why the British pound dominated the international economy in the nineteenth century, why the dollar rose to the top during World War II, and why the dollar has survived predictions of the imminent loss of its preeminence since the 1970s.

The long history of international currencies shows that the same factors that encourage their widespread use eventually lead to their abandonment. Money Beyond Borders makes a powerful case that the dollar is now on the downside of this cycle, and it considers who the winners and losers will be when there is flight away from the greenback. Revealing important patterns in the life cycles of international currencies over the past 2,500 years, the book offers valuable lessons and insights about how currencies rise--and why they fall.

Barry Eichengreen is the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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